For once, the eulogies for a departed Russian leader were not overwrought. In the case of Andrei Sakharov, they seemed simple, monumental affirmations of fact: "We have lost our moral compass," said a scientific colleague who worked with him on the Russian space program and in the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences. In the course of his roller-coaster career, Andrei Sakharov had been the youngest scientist ever elected to full membership in that elite body, a tribute to his remarkable...

MOSCOW, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Valery Abramkin, a former Soviet dissident, nuclear scientist and rights activist who was held for years in the Siberian gulag and campaigned for prison reform in Vladimir Putin's Russia, has died, his colleagues said on Saturday. Abramkin, 66, head of the Moscow Center For Prison Reform and a member of the Moscow Helsinki rights group and Putin's Presidential Rights Council, died late on Friday after a long illness. ...

Andrei Sakharov is one of those rarest of souls, cursed with a nobility of spirit that illuminates and blesses the darkest corners of the world the rest of us inhabit. Over and over he has paid the price for outspoken honesty under a system that dishonors and fears such fearlessness. Always he has understood it is his burden. And he has borne it for all those who did not have his strength and courage. Now 67 years old, the honored Soviet nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace laureate...

By Charles M. Madigan, a tribune senior editor and correspondent and writer of The Rambling Gleaner at chicagotribune.com/gleaner | February 14, 2006

After using the washroom at the apartment of the dissident Andrei Sakharov in Moscow a little less than 30 years ago, a friend reported that the tissue paper neatly stacked in the corner was cut up "Week in Review" sections from The New York Times. We were there for a dissident "news conference." "Week in Review" had found its way into the apartment of one of the most highly targeted dissenters of the Soviet era. Every word, every phone call, every step the Nobel laureate made was watched.

By Herbert Mitgang. Author and critic Herbert Mitgang is a fellow of the Society of American Historians | May 12, 2002

Sakharov By Richard Lourie Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 465 Pages, $30 Among those on the Other Side who contributed to the demise of the Cold War and the relatively friendly relations between the U.S. and Russia today were daring scientists and writers. At the risk of exile or the gulag, a small number of Soviet men and women exposed the tyrannical government in memoirs, novels, allegories and poems. Despite censorship, the words of...

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and his slain envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, were awarded the European Union's top human-rights prize on Thursday. The European Parliament awarded its 2003 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to Annan and those UN officials killed working for world peace. Vieira de Mello was among the Aug. 19 bombing victims at the UN headquarters in Baghdad. The 626-member EU assembly will award the $58,000 prize-- named after Soviet dissident Andrei...

Andrei Sakharov said: "I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of a society. I reject the notion that the death penalty has any essential deterrent effect on potential offenders. I am convinced that the contrary is true-that savagery begets only savagery." A fitting tribute to the memory of Mr. Sakharov by George Bush and the Congress would be to abolish the death penalty in our country.

By Herbert Mitgang. Author and critic Herbert Mitgang is a fellow of the Society of American Historians | May 12, 2002

Sakharov By Richard Lourie Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 465 Pages, $30 Among those on the Other Side who contributed to the demise of the Cold War and the relatively friendly relations between the U.S. and Russia today were daring scientists and writers. At the risk of exile or the gulag, a small number of Soviet men and women exposed the tyrannical government in memoirs, novels, allegories and poems. Despite censorship, the words of...

Recent headlines point out that an unhappy John Hinckley is asking, through a Newsweek interview, to be traded for Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. A few of us would like to go on record that this lad has far too overblown an estimate of his own worth. Someone should bring him down to Earth by pointing out that the Soviets are nothing if not realists, and insist on value received for value given.

Russia's financially troubled Sakharov Museum and Community Center for human rights announced Thursday that it has received a huge grant from tycoon Boris Berezovsky. The museum, which had warned recently that its funds were running out, expressed some misgivings about taking money from such a controversial figure and one who has never visited the institution. The museum is dedicated to dissident and Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov. Berezovsky, who is facing a criminal probe he...

On his final day in parliament, only hours before he died, Andrei Sakharov was bedeviling Mikhail Gorbachev for his recent footdragging on political and economic reforms, charging that the president was "leading the country to catastrophe, prolonging the process of perestroika for many years." It was Gorbachev, of course, who restored the exiled 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner to a leading role after more than a decade in which the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb was officially...

On Dec. 17, 1538, Pope Paul III excommunicated King Henry VIII of England. In 1777 France recognized America's independence. In 1925 Col. Billy Mitchell was convicted of insubordination at a court-martial and suspended from the Army for five years for accusing the War and Navy Departments of "incompetence" and "gross negligence" after two air disasters. (Twenty years later, he would be awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.) In 1957 the U.S....

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and his slain envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, were awarded the European Union's top human-rights prize on Thursday. The European Parliament awarded its 2003 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to Annan and those UN officials killed working for world peace. Vieira de Mello was among the Aug. 19 bombing victims at the UN headquarters in Baghdad. The 626-member EU assembly will award the $58,000 prize-- named after Soviet dissident Andrei...

On Oct. 9, 1002, Leif Ericson, the Norse mariner and adventurer, landed in what is now North America. In 1635 religious dissident Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1701 the Collegiate School of Connecticut (now Yale University) was chartered in New Haven, Conn. In 1776 a group of Spanish missionaries settled in present-day San Francisco. In 1888 the Washington Monument was opened to the public. In 1934 Yugoslavia's...

On Oct. 9, 1701, Yale College was founded in New Haven, Conn. In 1855 I. M. Singer registered the first sewing machine motor patent in New York. In 1888 the Washington Monument was opened to the public. In 1940 singer John Lennon was born in Liverpool, England. In 1958 Pope Pius XII died. In 1975 physicist Andrei Sakharov became the first Russian to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1981 Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin arrived in Cairo for...

Twenty years ago, Natan Sharansky, the human-rights activist, was whisked across Moscow under arrest in a car belonging to the Soviet Union's notorious KGB. He would spend the next nine years locked up under false charges of being an American spy. This week, Sharansky, now an Israeli government minister, was chauffeured through the same streets on an ironically different mission--to promote Russian-Israeli friendship and trade with fawning Moscow...

When I read of Andrei Sakharov's recent death, it reminded me of an incident which occurred while I was teaching English to Soviet Jews in Rogers Park. As part of my dissertation research on Soviet Jewish immigration to Chicago, I was examining the contribution of dissidents and other activists in the early 1970s to the first wave of emigration from the USSR. I posed the question to my students, asking them how important they considered the activist movement to the emigration. As there is no Russian...

On Oct. 9, 1002, Leif Ericson, the Norse mariner and adventurer, landed in what is now North America. In 1701 Yale College was founded in New Haven, Conn. In 1855 I.M. Singer registered the first sewing machine motor patent in New York. In 1930 Laura Ingalls became the first woman to fly across the United States. In 1946 the first electric blanket was manufactured in Petersburg, Va. In 1958 Pope Pius XII died. In 1967 Cuban guerrilla leader...